Authors: Clive James
This month has been the launching season for my new collection of poems,
Nefertiti in the Flak Tower.
Not many younger people, I have been discovering, know what a flak
tower is, or was. Perhaps I should have called the book something else. One of the poems in the book is called ‘Whitman and the Moth’: it might have been wiser to call the book that.
Early in the launching season I was asked to read the poem aloud on that excellent radio programme
Front Row.
The poem is a meditation on the old poet at the point of his death and I’m
afraid I found the right voice for it exactly.
•
I have been exhausted for more than two years now, by illness. Leukaemia is practically the least of my ailments. In a lull between bad stretches the Saturday edition of the
Telegraph
kindly asked me to review television. That was about a year ago and we have now completed my first year on the case, so this month has been my first annual holiday. I tried to time
it so that the book launch could fit into the slot. When you are short of energy you have to ration it. So far I have managed to look busy by doing one thing at a time. Put it all together and
it’s a decent fraction of the work I did before I fell ill. I still feel guilty, however, that hours go by when I don’t touch the keyboard.
•
I doubt if illness improves the concentration. Though its individual perceptions take thought, a critical column is comparatively easy to construct because it is cumulative.
This column you are reading now counts as a general column and it will have to have an argument. In a general column you have to tackle a subject, and my subject, by force of circumstance, must be
about how I have been so sick that almost nothing else has happened to me.
•
Or not much that shows. So far I’ve been lucky that way. Various clinics stick needles in me but I look reasonably intact. The major action is going on in the soul.
Everything has become personal. Famously productive until his death, my old friend Christopher Hitchens had a memorial service in New York. Almost everyone I knew was there. I would have been there
too but I was not allowed to fly. I was envious of them. Even less nobly, I was envious of him. I read his obituaries: he had attracted so much love. What would be said of me when I was gone? I
almost was. Why not devote myself to the form of writing that has always mattered to me most?
•
But poems don’t necessarily come to you when you ask them. It is more than six months since I have had a poem in the works. I suspect the direct reason is one of the drugs
I am on, but there is an equal chance that I am simply in a dry patch. I was drugged to the nines when I lay in New York’s Mount Sinai hospital last year and wrote ‘Whitman and the
Moth’. I pride myself on that poem’s nifty construction. When poetry doesn’t come, the first thing that doesn’t come, as it were, is a structure. The combinative capacity
isn’t there. It might be there for prose, but with prose you know what happens next. With a poem, only the poem knows what happens next, and you must wait for it to speak. It can take
years.
•
Near the very end of his life, Hitchens wrote a brilliant piece about Philip Larkin. Some of his recent American admirers were surprised by how literature mattered to the Hitch
but those of us who had known him longer knew that his love for the language was his bedrock. I was not convinced, though, by some of those editors among his American obituarists who wrote of how
he would take home a huge new book and read it and review it in a single evening. I think he probably just reviewed it in a single evening.
•
The Hitch’s afflictions hurt badly and he was brave to bear them so well. Those of us less painfully stricken are obliged to be of good cheer. The whole process of being
kept alive against such relentless natural forces is, after all, very interesting. It takes all the science in the world. Most writers don’t see much adventure after they become successful.
Well, here is their chance. The hospital that looks after me, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, might as well be CERN. And in addition to the luxury of being the centre of so much attention, one is
contributing information to the last and greatest battle, between mankind and nature. Even as we waste away, the measurements of decline go to swell the data bank. One is thus less useless than one
feels. My scientist daughter caught me making a bad joke about the failure of the proposed NHS central computer. She explained that such a computer would be an essential tool for the future. So
there is a politics to one’s demise, like it or not.
While its subject was still alive, the first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson’s relentlessly hostile biography of Robert Frost had already come out, creating a lasting
image of the simple poet as a manipulator without conscience. Journalists of all altitudes loved that image because it made for easy copy: cracker-motto bard envied real poets, etc. After Frost
died, a third volume of the biography finished the job. On the basis of the complete trilogy of dud scholarship, published between 1966 and 1977, the opinion formed that the gap between
Frost’s achievement and his real life was too glaring to be tolerated. Helen Vendler, justifiably regarded in the US as a guru in matters of poetry, pronounced Frost to be a monster of
egotism.
When I last heard of her, Helen Vendler was proclaiming the virtues of John Ashbery’s circular poem
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
, which has been published in a limited edition
circular book. While she deals with the vital critical question of whether the reader should turn the book around, or take a turn around the book, we can assume that if there is any further
correcting to be done to Frost’s reputation as a monstrous egotist, it probably won’t be done by Helen Vendler. Too good a critic to be completely deaf to Frost’s poetic quality,
she published, in 2012, an essay that praised his lyricism, but the essay did not do much to make up for her 1996
Paris Review
interview in which she lavishly name-checked dozens of her
touchstone American poets while mentioning Frost exactly once, and only in passing.
Luckily not even America – still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey – has proved entirely devoid of
critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person. Though Thompson’s hostility was a powerfully attractive theme for the
kind of dabblers who would always rather read blame than praise, it could not quite offset the praise from such an expert witness as, say, Randall Jarrell. In his mighty little book
Poetry and the Age
, Jarrell showed for all time just how Frost worked the miracle of disguising the complicated as the elementary.
But although Frost’s artistic greatness is nowadays more widely acknowledged, it is still generally thought to be the output of some kind of simpleton. There have been further, and less
crass, biographies since Lawrance Thompson’s, but they have had to fight a hard battle, as for a town already reduced to rubble. The damage that was done by Thompson still lingers. Deaf to a
tone that made him the living echo of Iago, Thompson wrote to Frost: ‘The simple truth is that I love you.’ God help any artist who acquires so passionate a lover. Onlookers, thirsty
for gossip, will always think that there must have been something in it. To put Frost’s proper renown back on track, what’s needed is the re-emergence of common sense.
The new collection of Frost’s letters should help. Eventually there will be three volumes, but the first volume is already enough to prove, if proof were needed, that Frost was anything
but the shit-kicking fireside verse-whittler of legend. When not actually practising his art, he thought about it so long and hard that it was a wonder he had time for anything else. His detractors
would like to think that he found plenty of time to suborn editors, sabotage rival poets and practise infinite cruelties on his wife and family, but even his detractors must have noticed that he
got quite a lot of meticulously crafted poems written. These letters are proof that his working methods and principles were the product of a mental preoccupation that began very early. Right from
the start he had an idea of what a poem should do.
He wrote his first poems at home in America, but did not get as far along towards an acknowledged status as he had a right to expect. Eventually, when he was already thirty-eight years old
– a late age to become an expatriate – he sought a more hospitable literary environment in England. But before he crossed the Atlantic in 1912, he was already regaling his American
editors and poetic acquaintances with his considered ideas about poetry: ideas that add up to a conception of modernism still pertinent today. He talked of ‘skilfully breaking the sounds of
sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’. This was an early occurrence of a key phrase: the sounds of sense, or the sound of sense, went on cropping
up in his writings, lectures, letters and conversations to the very end of his life.
It was a true idea, not just an easy motto. Implicit in the idea was that the spoken language supplies the poet with a store of rhythms which he can, and indeed must, fit in counterpoint to the
set frame of the metre. A hundred years later, very few poets want to face the labour involved in doing this.
But those few are the ones we tend to notice. What we notice is their musicality, and conjuring music out of spoken words was an aim that Frost made explicit. He was ready to suffer neglect as
long as he could pursue that aim. Having safely arrived in England, Frost wrote to an American friend: ‘Poetry is not a living. It is not even a reputation today. It is at best a reputation
next year or the year after.’ Does that sound like a master manipulator hustling for position?
Of course it doesn’t. But he was justifiably concerned with getting his work put in front of the public; all the more justifiably because he was, in his own schooled and studious opinion,
pretty good. ‘A little of the success I have waited for so long won’t hurt me. I rather think I deserve it.’ In England, he was able to bring out the first few slim collections
that could somehow never find a publisher back in America. In England, his self-esteem was augmented by esteem from others, with a familiar result: he was able to worry less about the awkward
necessity to blow his own trumpet. And anyway, some of his new fans could blow a trumpet at the level of a military bugler announcing the next dawn.
Ezra Pound admired him, and told the literary world. Prominent writers listened to Pound because they had no choice: he got into their heads like an earwig. We can deduce two main reasons for
Pound being impressed by Frost. The first is merely persuasive: Frost really was at home in Latin and Greek, whereas Pound only pretended to be. But Pound, armed with an infinite intellectual
arrogance, was not easily made to feel ignorant by anybody. The second reason is decisive: Pound could see – or, better to say, hear – that Frost was a supreme technician, a bearer of
the modern torch. Frost’s advocacy of a language ‘absolutely unliterary’, of a ‘war on clichés’, was catnip to Pound, who had long favoured just such a campaign
himself. The fact that Frost was better equipped than himself to pursue it was not one that crossed Pound’s mind; or if it did, he was not inhibited in his determination to jump up and down
on Frost’s behalf.
Frost, a lifelong enemy of all arty pretension, thought that Pound dressed the part of the poet. But Frost never disparaged Pound’s antics, even when they worked to his, Frost’s,
detriment in the very area which his English sojourn was meant to ameliorate: his standing at home. Pound not only proclaimed Frost’s virtues, he insisted on announcing, at the top of his
voice, that those virtues had been beyond the comprehension of American editors. Frost, who had always been polite to editors even when they rejected him, was appalled. Quite apart from the
question of elementary courtesy, Frost knew that he would have to go home some day soon, and at this rate the earth would be scorched before he got there. He and Pound fell out. But it was after
they fell out, and not before, that Frost told a friend: ‘Pound is the most generous of mortals.’ A poet who is out to sabotage his rivals – a monster of egotism –
doesn’t say things like that.
Frost rated Pound highly but Yeats even higher: ‘the man of the last 20 years’. Amiable and clearly decent, Frost was welcomed into all the right groups of literati; ‘the
allurements of the London literary crowd’. But he was allured only up to a point. He seldom gave his whole admiration to anyone. He was glad to have the company of the Georgian poets but his
praise for their work was generalized. His praise for W. H. Davies was specific but limited: ‘those flashes in a line’. He was unequivocal only about Edward Thomas, his fellow
late-starter. Here, surely, is the certain and final proof that Frost, from the career angle, was at least as much a giver as a taker. He did everything he could to help Thomas along as a poet, and
when Thomas was killed on the Western Front, Frost’s grief was terrible.
Despite the loss of a true soulmate, however, Frost’s invasion of Europe had been an early version of D-Day. Success was achieved and made secure. But there was nothing easy about the
process, and a close reading of these letters will reveal that England, despite its traditional congeniality for an idealistic literary class, was just as rich a source as America for chumps,
cheats and fools. Booby-traps were made more deadly for Frost by his accursed virtue of honouring a bargain. There was a woman called Mrs Nutt who got hold of some of his best copyrights and used
them to screw him around for years. He should have had her bumped off. (Later in his life, he should have lowered the boom on Lawrance Thompson, but nobody could persuade Frost against honouring a
promise even if it killed him, and that one damned near did.)
Back in America, he could take pride in the success of his plan to build up a reputation offshore. It had worked, and he had become thought of, at long last, as a prominent American poet. But
poetry, in the material sense, was still not a living. He worked hard to make a go of farming, thereby providing himself with the store of imagery that lent the substance to nearly all of his most
memorable work. But in the long run he could not make farming pay the rent. Farming is a full-time job, and perhaps Frost spent too much time with his mind on other things – poetic
masterpieces, for example.